Short Shorts and a Long Axe: A Review of Fear Street Part Two: 1978
Before reading this piece, I recommend reading my write-up for Fear Street Part One. It probably makes sense without doing so, but this review and analysis does build on what I’ve already said.
Review (Light Spoilers)
The first and foremost thing to consider with regard to Fear Street Part Two: 1978 is the hurdle of sequel-dom. My impulse is to ask the question of whether Part Two holds up on its own as a film (as a work of art) absent the larger context of its role as the middle chapter in a trilogy, and maybe that’s not a good impulse or even a workable one. The movie is securely bound to the larger Fear Street narrative, as its main story, set in the late 70s, is bookended by “present day” (1994 in the film’s timeline) sections pulling it backward to the previous movie and forward to the final chapter. There’s a split focus here that I think does the movie a disservice, not just because it makes it hard to evaluate on its own merits but because it raises questions of pacing and audience investment. There are certainly plenty of film franchises—some of them trilogies—but as a middle sequel, 1978 feels perhaps unique in the awkwardness of its narrative since its construction simultaneously asks the audience to maintain the level of investment and tension from the end of the first film for brief bursts but then to also get invested in the new, even larger cast of characters, with their own doomed, bloody arc, that are the focus of the movie’s massive central flashback.
To reference The Lord of the Rings again—To understand these issues with 1978, you might imagine an alternate version of The Two Towers where, in addition to continuing the story of the Fellowship from the first film, the movie dedicated a huge chunk (a majority, even) of its runtime to an entirely new cast also setting out from the Shire with a cursed object and slowly unraveling the nature of said object and assembling a team to also take that object to Mordor. On the one hand, Frodo and Sam and company are knee-deep in the mounting trauma and rising stakes of their quest, but, then, on the other, this alternate group of characters is just starting out, retreading familiar emotional and narrative ground and full of energy, with bright eyes, asking the audience to root for them as upstart adventurers. It’s a division of emotional investment that might work in a book, but it’s a big ask in a film since they function best when they’re tightly-constructed.
Here’s a rhetorical question: Is this Fear Street movie actually about Ziggy (Sadie Sink / Gillian Jacobs) and her sister, Cindy (Emily Rudd), and their friends and peers at Camp Nightwing, or is it about Deena (Kiana Madeira) and her brother, Josh (Benjamin Flores Jr.), and their quest to rid Deena’s (ex)girlfriend, Sam (Olivia Scott Welch), of the murderous influence of the legendary local witch Sarah Fier?
The question is rhetorical since, of course, the movie is clearly about both groups. They’re tied together by the same curse and by similar harrowing experiences (with some of the same human and supernatural players), but the question is ultimately also a technical and emotional one and not just plot-related. I think 1978 fails to meaningfully split the difference. The 1994 stuff sits awkwardly, sucking time (albeit comparatively little) and impact away from what should have been the film’s one, true focus. I’m backseat directing/writing/producing here, but my temptation would have been to clear-cut the cast of the first movie down to nothing—or next to nothing—to make way for the second film to stand alone, with the flashback its sole focus. But that would be a huge creative risk since it would mean that, in the end, the only ones to actually solve the mystery of the witch’s curse in full would be the audience, without any persistent onscreen surrogates to root for. It’s not really in the spirit of mainstream filmmaking, and it doesn’t feel in the spirit of the sort of books Fear Street is based on. Awkward as it may be, this is Deena, Sam, and Josh’s story, and Ziggy is functionally just kind of here to help them fill in some gaps… over the course of nearly two Deena-Sam-and-Josh-less hours.
The metaphor of the “awkward middle child” is a cliché at this point, but it kind of makes sense here. This is an awkward film because of its positioning as a bridge between two other films, two (or more) time periods, and two different casts of characters at different points in their narrative and emotional arcs. It’s also awkward since 1978, more so than 1994, is dominated much more clearly by certain horror references—namely to the Friday the 13th movies—which means it more readily invites comparison with that other series, which is considered essentially representative of the slasher genre that these films kind of want to be a part of. I know I’ve seen other reviews compare 1994 to Scream, but I didn’t get the sense that the first Fear Street wanted to actually be Scream specifically. The points of comparison were pretty superficial and pretty trifling in the grand scheme of things, like opening with an ominous phone call and the look of one of the film’s three killers.
To me, personally, 1994 felt like its own thing, referential though it could be. 1978 much more frequently recalls Friday the 13th and so invites a more critical comparison. From the goofy, bloody “1978” in its title when it appears in the movie to how it basically steals its principle (or at least most immediate) killer’s design from that older franchise and its setting of a summer camp from slasher films past and even with regard to how much more frequent and explicit its sexual content is, Part Two feels like it wants to be that sort of movie. Cindy is such a heavy-handed prude character and her former friend Alice (Ryan Simpkins) such an uncompromising libertine that they belong in Friday the 13th, in all its campy (ha) glory. But Fear Street wants to try to dig beneath the clichés to find emotional depth in its continued discussion of the way that classism—mundane or magically-enforced—traps people in cycles of despair and ruin, both external and internal. It feels subversive of the genre in that way, which could be seen as a positive. It has pretensions of being better than its inspiration, though whether it’s actually just too big for its short shorts (which perhaps aren’t necessarily as short as they should be) is a matter worth considering. After all, there are things that the “dumber” slashers do a lot better than Fear Street—namely, the actual slashing.
Obviously, there’s only so much I can say right now without spoilers, but Fear Street Part Two feels very much of a kind with its prequel in its approach to its gorier moments. This point might be contentious since it’s likely objectively true that 1978 has more violence in it than 1994 (maybe since there are just more people available to murder), but I still don’t think the movie’s very-much-R-rated violence registers the way that you might expect if I were to list off the injuries and deaths (almost all axe-related) in isolation. I’m not sure the movie feels disinterested in the violence, but I’m not sure how it really feels about it—if any of this is actually supposed to be gross and scary or not. This second movie is still jump-scare-free, but there are moments that also seem engineered to feel startling (such as one involving a match in a dark room) that just don’t land.
It’s more of a feeling than anything strictly technical, but one impression that I had of Fear Street—not just 1978— on my way to evaluating it is that it knows what horror looks like without really understanding how to make it horrifying. There are some child deaths that you can see as pretty clearly upsetting in theory, even though they happen offscreen, but they just don’t register strongly. There’s one really mean kill toward the end of the movie that I’ll talk about below in the heavy spoilers section that still also lacks visceral impact, though it’s emotionally kind of messed up. And the one scene where I think the violence is emphasized and an actual focal point while still also being undercut is another one I can’t talk about without spoilers, so if you don’t want the spoilers, just know that I think the movie does probably know what impactful violence looks like but that it also seems to—for some reason—choose not to render it that way most of the time. Like 1994, this is definitely a grisly film, but it’s still handled with a light enough of a touch that I think someone who isn’t an absolute gore fiend could watch it. Absolute gore fiends will still be disappointed, however, since, while the blood does fly, it isn’t particularly horrific.
And maybe it’s not even meant to be all that horrifying since this is a film for teenagers? If that’s the case, it feels like a decision very much at odds with the rating and the content. I could understand that being a conscious choice if this was a PG or even a PG-13 clearly intended to appeal to a broader adolescent audience, but Fear Street, lack of impact and scares aside, is very much an R-rated film (and not just one of those borderline cases where it feels like a technicality because someone said “fuck” one too many times for the MPAA). But then, on the other, other hand, there can be a great deal of variance in R-rated films. The level of violence and sex in a movie might make it R-rated, but there could certainly be films that are more extreme. Since R is technically for ages sixteen-plus, it’s not entirely unreasonable to assume that the filmmakers are still holding back for a teenage audience. It just feels weird to watch for me since the violence on display looks like it should have more impact than it does.
The thought did enter my mind, though, that I might be underestimating the level and impact of the violence in Fear Street Part Two since, even though I’m still a generally squeamish person, I’ve been reasonably desensitized over the years. To test that and get a reasonable comparison for Fear Street, I went back and re-watched the 2009 Friday the 13th film. Having done that, I can say that, yes, the violence in 1978 lacks impact, whether that’s accidental or by design. Kills in Friday the 13th tend to be a lot more vicious thanks to a combination of factors, including the variety of methods Jason uses to kill his targets, many of which are designed to torture rather than simply kill, as well as sound design and editing choices that lend more of a physicality and weightiness to the deaths. Some are quick, but they can take longer than the ones in 1978 overall, giving the impact of what’s happening more time to register. There were several that made me go “Oof,” in fact, with how chunky and nasty they are. By comparison, Fear Street Part Two’s kills tend to be fast and clean. The amount of blood is probably around the same, but it’s the execution (pun intended) that makes the difference. I did end up watching the “Killer Cut” of Friday the 13th rather than the theatrical version, but since that version is still rated R, I consider it a fair comparison. While I’m talking about that other film here, I will also briefly say that, while I’ve always defended it as a better slasher film (and sequel to the first Friday the 13th given its narrative positioning) than its critical reception might suggest, I especially enjoyed it this time. It’s funnier and sexier than Fear Street Part Two, and it similarly doesn’t use many jump scares, choosing when to startle the audience with a bit more care than some other nominally trashy horror films of the modern era. Like Fear Street, it also likes its licensed music.
Yes, 1978 is still loaded with licensed music; however, the use is sort of an improvement over the first movie, at least in the sense that it avoids having anything like the sequence in that movie where it blows through three licensed songs in very quick succession, though this installment does still use different songs in different back-to-back scenes that aren’t that far apart. I feel like you have to hit a point of diminishing returns with the constant song-switching, at which the moods they’re ostensibly supposed to set become less impactful when you’re constantly being bombarded with lyrics and become aware of the emotional trick that’s being played on you. I also do like the film’s actual score—especially the piece with some high-octane The Omen-esque chanting—and wish it had had more of an opportunity to stretch its legs. Rather than exclusively just blasting the audience with song after song, though, Fear Street Part Two does use specific songs more than once and in ways that have some actual pathos. The main two would be Kansas’ “Carry On Wayward Son” and David Bowie’s “The Man Who Sold The World,” which act more like proper emotional landmarks or bookends within the film. I like both of those songs but hate that Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” gets used more casually. This is a matter of personal taste, though. I don’t recall actually hearing Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” in the film itself when it was used in the trailer. This isn’t ordinarily weird since trailers use music like this all the time; however, it’s a little odd since the first film’s trailer used White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human,” which was then also used in the actual movie.
In terms of its visual presentation and unlike the previous film, 1978 doesn’t use “bisexual lighting,” apart from a 90s bit at the end, and instead has its own signature color identity. Going off the poster, 1978 is meant to be red and green to the first film’s purple, red, and blue. This supposition seems to be right, as the color red appears frequently in the movie—in Ziggy’s hair, in the strange moss that grows near the camp toilets, and in the lighting of specific scenes (especially in some locations like the aforementioned toilets). 1978 doesn’t really whip out the garish lighting until toward the end, where we finally get some of the nasty green. It makes sense as a choice since the green stands out as sick and off-putting, whereas red isn’t strictly associated with violence. It’s also the color of passion, and, when diluted to more of an orange, it gives the film a sort of nostalgic warmth appropriate for Ziggy’s feelings about how her life has turned out. By comparison with how she’s ended up, the time around the Camp Nightwing massacre was positively rosy.
Much like how Part One failed to really justify its 90s setting, there’s also little in this second film that seems to require that the movie be set in the 70s specifically. The costumes stand out a bit more this time around, but I’m still not convinced the movie goes for the short shorts as much as it could have. I actually watched it a second time to confirm some things—one of which was exactly where the shorts were and how short they were. If I had to guess why the movie doesn’t quite commit to the men’s shorts being period-appropriate my guess would be that they were seen as too goofy and too distracting, too “cringe” on some level for a modern audience. It’s not like the length of the shorts is critical, and I already feel like I’ve written the word “shorts” a lot more than I should have, but I can’t help but wish that 1978 had leaned into its inspiration a bit more. But the movie wants to be taken more seriously, so I can understand the design choice. Although there is some rough expository dialogue in the mix and the characters talk pretty frequently and awkwardly about drugs, 1978 is less unintentionally goofy than the first movie. Where that one had some teen elements that threatened to spill over into unbelievable territory, 1978 doesn’t feel like it’s running into that sort of territory quite as hard. I’m not saying it’s subdued in that regard, but nothing depicted here in terms of melodrama feels more over-the-top than what was in 1994. It holds the needle steady, which isn’t nothing.
If you enjoyed Fear Street Part One, then Part Two feels like a pretty safe bet. It doesn’t have anything like the inventive twist from 1994 about the witch’s possessed or summoned killers only caring about their specific target which led to many of that movie’s slasher sequences being a bit more conceptually interesting. 1978 doesn’t have any new concepts to play with on top of the familiar bits, and it focuses on one particular type of slasher film reference in a way that invites comparison more easily and raises questions about why I wouldn’t just watch that other movie instead. The worst thing I could say about 1978 is that it feels like watered down Friday the 13th. Fear Street’s class commentary is interesting to me, but is that even apparent in the film itself? Is it even intentional? There’s an argument to be made that Fear Street, with its social commentary and its awareness of itself as piece of horror media in the tradition of horror media, might be the superior use of the Friday the 13th iconography if your metric for comparing and scoring the two is how intelligent they seem to be. On the other hand, if you score the two bloody murder camp stories based on how sexy and violent they are and how enjoyable they are to watch (as opposed to interpret), I’m not sure Fear Street should win.
Was it even worth reviewing each Fear Street entry separately? They’re all available at this point, so it seems likely that anyone who watches one is just going to go straight down the line, possibly in the same day. This is still a very competent film, albeit with the new issues posed by its split narrative, and it’s not hard to recommend if you like horror and don’t mind how light of a touch it has with, well, horror. Me—I love the aesthetic and mood of horror, and it’s always Halloween in my head, so something like this is a fine little treat. I love, on some level, any movie, however lackluster, that begins with the premise “One summer, at a camp by the lake…” or “Responding to a distress beacon of unknown origin, the USS Whatever floated through the starry void…” I can even kind of love how Fear Street feels cute in some ways—like a wallflower teen’s YA novel rendition of something that probably could have been rendered more impactfully had it been made for adults.
Further Thoughts (Heavy Spoilers)
As with Fear Street Part One: 1994, there are some things I want to look at in greater detail in this section of the piece where I can spoil more of the particular details of this second film’s plot:
First of all, the way that adult Ziggy seems to live in front of her television and with her entire life regulated by clocks and alarms made me think about the 2018 Halloween sequel and how one of its preoccupations was with how the final girl of a slasher film might live the rest of her life after the credits rolled. Flashing far beyond the initial harrowing to discover what adult life looks like for such a person is something both Fear Street Part Two and the aforementioned Halloween 2018 do well. Ziggy’s life spun out of control years ago, so she controls herself excessively. This is communicated well nonverbally.
Quick continuity nitpick: I’m pretty sure there are shots of the early conversation outside between Deena and Ziggy where you can see the trunk of the car in the background and where it appears to be empty. I’m pretty sure the tied-up Sam should be visible there, but she isn’t. In the event that I’m partially wrong and Sam is too deep in the trunk to be seen from the angle shown, I’m still going to put this down as a bit of a nitpick since it feels like we should be able to see her behind Ziggy and Deena here to better make her presence and the emotional weight she carries felt in this scene.
Returning to positives, though, I really did expect a fake-out with the scene early in the flashback where Ziggy was being tortured by other campers. I expected some sort of initiation ritual for the camp that would fall away after Ziggy passed some kind of test or the messing around hit a certain threshold, but the movie surprised me by being so genuinely bloodthirsty so early on. It deserves credit for that.
Back to nitpicks: The cast of characters is maybe too large. I had completely forgotten about Joan and Kurt for a long stretch of the movie, and when we cut to them humping while Tommy is on his murder spree, at first I had no idea who they even were. On the other hand, expanding the cast like this was also a good idea since it made room for somewhat more high-stakes violence more frequently. 1994, in retrospect, had a perhaps too-small main cast, which basically guaranteed no meaningful deaths until the climax. Meanwhile, 1978 has more incidental characters we get to know just well enough to feel for on a basic, animal level in time for them to get axed (literally). Shout out to counselor Gary, in particular, who was barely in the movie but probably got the biggest laugh from me for witnessing counselor young Nick Goode’s obvious affection for camper Ziggy and being vocally a bit dubious about whether that was strictly ethical. He was seldom seen and died fast, but I still felt a little for him.
Speaking of the deaths, 1978 doesn’t shy away from killing the kids, which is a bit surprising. Like I said before, these deaths are only ever implied with onscreen hacking and splattering, where the actual violence is hidden from view, and some brief, dimly-lit shots of the aftermath, but there’s still potential there. If the movie was capable of (or willing to?) render its violence more viscerally, these kills in particular could have been impactful. That Tommy remorselessly axes the sweet but awkward kid who was concerned about his (Tommy’s) wellbeing earlier in the film is another great example of how the movie pretty skillfully develops otherwise sidenote characters just enough to make their deaths matter. In retrospect, this kill is also a pretty mean one given that the kid in question gets rebuffed and tormented a bit by other campers in the same scene that ends with his murder. As I’ll discuss in the next paragraph, there is a sadistic streak in the Fear Street movies that shows itself only periodically.
The “mean” death I mentioned before was Alice’s. There’s something kind of especially ballsy or even funny (though it’s not played that way) about how the movie lets her make a big, emotional speech about how she needs to go along to be there to end the witch’s curse for good despite her injured leg, just for Tommy to come hurtling at her as soon as she’s done speaking and finish her off instantly. Like killing the kids, taking into consideration the tone of this kill, there’s a version of 1978 in another universe that is absolutely, delightfully cruel to its young characters in a way that would distinguish it more as a slasher film. I actually did react to Alice’s death (by saying it was “mean”). The more I think about it, though, the more it feels a bit like a replay of Kate’s death, however, in the sense that the movie goes to some lengths to make the character, whose initial defining characteristic is just DRUGS, sympathetic before killing her off somewhat unexpectedly. Maybe it’s thematically resonant with 90s Nick Goode’s note to Ziggy? It’s happening again, indeed.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense for the mystical, Satanic cave network to connect with the camp as well as it does. Surely kids would have been all over that obvious tunnel under the toilet years ago, for example, and, surely, said tunnel should have been a lot grosser than it was after years of… use. I don’t entirely disbelieve the convenience of the tunnel network for the same reason I didn’t entirely disbelieve the over-the-top stuff with the state of the school and the antics on the athletic bus in 1994—since it’s absolutely the sort of heightened reality stuff I would expect to find in a story like this one written for adolescents or kids. What I do take issue with is that, again, if the movie was willing to commit more to being gross, the idea of trying to escape from a cave through a toilet could have been really harrowing and interesting and darkly comedic. I’m imaging The Descent but with poop, which is maybe a little slice of The Shawshank Redemption?
Here’s a one way in which this movie is better than the previous installment: I think 1978 benefits from Tommy’s role as the sole killer for most of its runtime. Even though he doesn’t speak—and even though he’s just Diet Jason, from his choice of weaponry to his wardrobe—the fact that you have one killer, with his distinctive murder weapon and distinctive visual style, dominating the film gives the audience time to grow attached to him in his role. It’s pretty obvious that Tommy is going to become the masked axe murderer from the first film, and I wonder if anyone was shocked by the reveal of his final form when Ziggy tries to suffocate him with the sack that becomes his mask. I thought the way that Tommy was filmed, emphasizing his size, was pretty clearly reminiscent of the framing of the axe-wielding killer in the first film, which was possibly a subtle touch, though I think it was also just obvious, visual suggestion aside, from the plot.
Mixed: Ziggy and Cindy basically speed run the plot of the first movie here at the end of 1978, which kind of adds to the divided emotional investment problem I mentioned earlier since it asks the audience to get invested in the same twists as before, which is maybe why it is kind of a speed run as well. Cindy somehow intuits at the climax that Ziggy is the one the killers want since she bled on the witch’s hand, like it’s just common knowledge when she probably had no way of actually knowing that. Of course, the situation with the blood on the witch’s bones has to lead to a repeat of the revelation from the first film that the killers only want the bleeder, though the lore gets expanded a bit to suggest that the killers will also ravage Shadysiders indiscriminately while ignoring people from Sunnyvale. This kind of explains the inconsistency I thought I found in the hospital murders in 1994, but then it also raises further questions of potential inconsistency. Namely, why didn’t the killers in the first film kill more indiscriminately all over town? Maybe the rule is that they do that by default unless the curse is actively “locked onto” an individual, in which case they only want that person? I don’t want to focus too much on minutiae like this since these sorts of nitpicks aren’t really my style, and I think it hurts film as a medium to make pointing out little inconsistencies or plot holes the defining element of film criticism in the popular consciousness.
The more meaningful question here is whether the re-run of the first film’s plot to beat the curse is effective and affecting or just feels perfunctory. There is a certain dramatic irony and likely added tension to seeing Ziggy and Cindy commit wholeheartedly to a doomed course of action. We know the witch’s body isn’t under the hanging tree, and we also know that there is no way to satisfy the blood curse but to die. That doesn’t mean the blood falling out of Ziggy’s nose and onto the hand at what already felt like the end of the film, starting off a fresh chain of horror, didn’t still feel a little perfunctory, though it technically makes sense in the lore thanks to Alice’s earlier discovery that the witch’s body apparently causes blood to fall.
This sequence of events leads to the one impactful use of violence, though. Cindy sacrifices herself to run interference for Ziggy, taking Tommy’s aggression for herself when she stops him from attacking her sister, only for another killer to get Ziggy immediately. While Tommy hacks at Cindy’s body, Ziggy is felled and stabbed repeatedly. As they’re both dying, the girls look at each other and share a moment. During this moment, the violence is slowed down, and we get a close look at the weapons striking home as the sisters die having only just recently reconciled after years of emotional distance. The violence itself still isn’t particularly gruesome-feeling since the scene’s mood is more melancholy than gross, but the way that we can actually see Cindy’s flesh react to the axe hitting her makes the brutality feel like it matters much more so than the earlier kills where everything was distant or obscured in some way (offscreen or hidden by darkness or over so fast the bodies might as well have jumped instantly from whole to mutilated without any pretensions of actual violence). It was the one moment in the movie where I thought that the awfulness of the violence inflicted was sort of viscerally-communicated.
Closing in on the end with a nitpick, even though I said I don’t do nitpicks: I know that we’ve been witnessing Ziggy’s story firsthand and in the past, but the movie’s script just seems to assume that Deena and Josh had the same viewing experience because there is no way that Ziggy could have been telling them this story without revealing that she was Ziggy (no way that makes any kind of human sense, anyway). Presumably they thought she was Cindy since a “C. Berman” survived and not a “Z. Berman,” but I still don’t think the movies ever really treated her identity like it was supposed to be a twist. On my rewatch, I did think I might have seen some red in Cindy’s hair (though that might have just been the lighting), but there wasn’t nearly enough for someone to confuse present-day Ziggy with her and especially not from looking at the picture of the sisters that Ziggy shows her audience when she starts her story.
Maybe, if you break it down and assume some sort of weird, evasive storytelling on Ziggy/Christine’s part, it makes sense for Deena and Josh to be surprised, but since the audience isn’t surprised with them, despite the fact that they’re our surrogates, learning about these things ostensibly as we do, the moment doesn’t land emotionally. Maybe it’s another way in which the story’s construction divides the audience emotionally. It separates us from the characters whose perspective we’re supposed to be identifying with in the overall arc of the trilogy in a way that means we no longer feel what they feel. To backseat direct a bit more, maybe there should have been interludes that returned to the 90s throughout so that we could reconnect with Deena, Josh, and Sam, but then we would have spent less time and would have felt less immediacy with the 70s crew, so, again, the film kind of has split priorities that don’t reconcile well.
I will say here, spinning off that previous point somewhat, that this whole thing feels like it would probably have worked better as a series, where you expect divergences and much longer emotional investment with frequent splitting. I feel this notable disconnect after just a week’s wait between movies, and I can’t imagine how this would have played as a theatrical experience spaced any further apart. I wonder if the critical response wouldn’t have been significantly dulled if reviewers had had to reckon with the emotional investment/split interest issues across a greater distance between entries. Of course, someone “binging” the content and going immediately from film to film isn’t going to necessarily feel the separation from Deena and Sam and Josh as acutely (since they literally just came from the climax of the previous part in a single sitting), but I think that it is a real issue with this film and that it probably becomes even more dire with time. I just don’t think 1978 has the space to adequately get people re-invested in Deena, Sam, and Josh at an appropriate level for their place in their narrative while also doing an entire movie’s worth of stuff with the 70s characters.
Finally, as noted in the review, the most obvious thematic weight of Fear Street Part Two lies with its interrogation of class issues. Shadyside is “held down” (to essentially quote Ziggy) by a literal curse, but it’s not disconnected from the real world of economic precarity and cycles of poverty. Cindy’s polo shirt is the obvious symbol in this case. We see her seemingly over-react to it being stained with the toilet moss early in the film, and then Ziggy tells us that Cindy actually had to save up to buy that shirt. It’s the perfect encapsulation of the film’s take on cyclical precarity: It’s this investment for Cindy that it wouldn’t be for anyone from Sunnyvale. Something as disposable as a shirt is a whole Labor for her to acquire. She has to try harder than anyone from that other community, and despite trying, she can’t do anything but fail. It’s not just her only good shirt that gets stained at the toilets and then ripped in the woods—It’s indicative of how, no matter how hard she tries, the curse (mystical and economical) will come for her. More literally and realistically, the grip of poverty is such that she’s fighting against an unbeatable current of circumstances outside of her control and she can’t escape its pull. She can’t stop being poor and can’t stop being immediately suspected of criminality no matter how hard she tries. She’ll always have stains or holes in the façade that reveal her to people like Kurt.
The shirt is also an affectation, of course. Cindy took it on to try to get away from who she was born to be, but it’s a lie, just like her pristine image, abstaining from sex and swearing and practicing obsessive hypervigilance about drugs. When Cindy truly opens up to Alice about all this in the cave after Alice is injured, she rips her shirt further on her own to help bandage Alice’s leg. The visual symbolism is clear: As Cindy accepts that she was only ever playing a rigged, losing game from the start and as she accepts Alice again as a friend and as she accepts the reality of the witch’s curse, she gives up on the affectation and becomes herself again. The shirt is no longer a concern. She’s able to finally reconnect with her sister later having made this change in her sense of self and is also capable of killing Tommy when she previously didn’t think she could. Cindy is pulled toward a violent and tragic resolution, but she can’t rise above her circumstances because they’re outside her control, and fighting causes her mental anguish that, ironically, seems to get better when she gives in and accepts that she’s screwed. Maybe it’s only then that she can effectively fight back, mentally and physically.
Just like Cindy can’t escape who she is destined to be, neither can Nick Goode. One gut punch, which we all see coming but that I think still stings, even a little, is that Nick distances himself from Ziggy decisively and immediately at the end of the flashback. Even though he wants to be the guy who likes Stephen King and spiders and Ziggy openly, he will follow the trajectory set for him by his family name and economic status. Just like Cindy can only fail, Nick can only succeed. He can be found alone by Kurt, obviously shaken up, and with the blood of others on his hands and still be trusted. At the end, he’s not even suspected despite being slathered in other people’s blood. Of course, it was just Tommy, the Shadysider, that went berserk. The truth is there in how the supernatural presence only possesses Shadysiders—Only the economically vulnerable are forced into monstrous circumstances. The killers only target Shadysiders, and, even though it’s abstracted by the slasher premise, that’s a higher mortality rate reserved for them exclusively because of their background. The movie’s willingness to butcher even the children adds to the sense of atrocity committed, which, in the film’s universe, is cyclical and unstoppable like a force of nature, much like the real world machinations of capitalist society. Those destined for riches get rich, and those who are born poor stay poor and die, sometimes awfully.
I can kind of go on like this—about how, for example, Shadyside women are sort of dirty, little secrets for Sunnyvale men with regard to how Kurt and Joan sleep together (but only in secret) and how Nick can only keep in touch with Ziggy via coded messages or notes slipped through her door because being associated with her (and with her stories about what happened at the camp) harms his social status.
1978’s thematic messaging is still potent but perhaps less daring with how it pushes the other elements of “identity politics” into the background that made 1994 messier but also possibly more compelling and complicated. LGBT people and people of color really aren’t the focus this time around with the main characters, though you can find elements in the background. For example, it did seem like I saw more diversity in the shots of the Shadyside team at the camp than there was on the Sunnyvale side. Once again, however, class becomes the defining and most explicit element of the film’s commentary. And that choice presents a not entirely incorrect assessment of the state of things beyond the silver screen—see Ellen DeGeneres and George W. Bush hanging out or the latter’s apparently warm relationship with the Obamas for evidence that class overrides other aspects of one’s identity—but it’s still choosing to prioritize a view of society’s ills that ignores the specific, very real and very notable ways in which other aspects of identity paired with matters of class compound the suffering of real people even more vulnerable than Cindy and Ziggy.
Ultimately, there’s meaning here in this work of art (this film), as there usually is, but you have to dig around a bit to find it, and that doesn’t make the movie a truly great viewing experience. It lacks the conceptual twists of Fear Street Part One and feels like it depends much more for its identity on the existence of older (possibly better, depending on your metric) films. I started to like the movie a lot as I sat with it and as I wrote this later part of the analysis, but the likely viewing experience of other people is probably not going to be this deep dive. It’s going to be, say, looking for a bloody, thrilling time and not finding it. There’s meaningful art inside Fear Street Part Two: 1978, but there’s a goofy slasher in there too. And I’m left feeling like the two are not necessarily reconcilable. Or, at any rate, this specific film doesn’t manage to reconcile the two and, perhaps in doing so, to sharpen both sides into a proper cutting edge.
